Salsa in Washington DC - Cecilia's Club / DC Salsa Meet Up

December 23, 2007

Six days without Salsa. I guess it could be considered a holiday. I suppose bigger issue was that I didn’t see any Salsa event of overwhelming interest.

Supposedly the best weekly events are Clarendon Grill on Mondays and Barking Dog on Tuesdays. I wasn’t going to go to Barking Dog right after a long flight, and every option thereafter fizzled into oblivion. Timing is unfortunate this year – both Barking Dog and Clarendon Grill are closed for the rest of December.

The event I had pencilled in as worth checking out finally was DC Salsa Meetup Holiday Party at Cecilia’s (salsa.meetup.com/162 and www.ceciliasclub.com). DC Salsa Meetup has nearly 2500 members – the number of active members must be far fewer, but it is impressive nevertheless. There seemed to be quite a high interest in this party – 338 people said yes for their RSVP with another 35 maybes. I think this event set a new record for attendance from this organization.

The venue was quite spacious – larger dance floor compared to SOS wood surface at the Royal Sonesta Hotel (but smaller if carpeted surface at the hotel is included). I’m guessing there were over 300 people – maybe close to 400. The overall level of dancing was slightly below SOS – more or less about the same as the Coventry party. My best guess is that most of the top flight DC dancers were absent (aside from the die-hards).

After getting a little lost and searching for parking, I arrived around 10:30 and stayed until essentially closing time at 2 AM. The music seemed promising early (they were playing Cuando Te Vea (Bobby Valentin – probably from Rey Del Bajo) when I arrived), but not so good for a rather long time thereafter. They ran a contest, which dragged a bit as these things always do. I think they were conscientious about trying to keep it short though. I’m not sure if there was a DJ switch afterwards, but next 15-20 songs were all fused together and were generally uninteresting. Re-start of the Mambo (the DJ announced it) with Muneca (version unknown) coincided with start of large exodus. Songs thereafter included Descarga Cachao (version unknown), Vamonos Pal Monte (Eddie Palmieri – gets real fast towards the end), Ublabadu (Fania All Stars), En El Balcon (Tito Rodriguez), Aguanile (Willie Colon/Hector Lavoe – as the second to last song or the last song before lights were turned on – I thought it was a little insane) and finishing with a Marc Anthony.

I had decided to be a bit more choosy about picking dance partners after the contests based upon my experience up until then. Thus despite ending up dancing with same person for 3 songs or more on a few occasions, I ended up enjoying them anyway. I’m not sure but I might have asked some of them for a second song etc even if there were clear breaks between the songs. Otherwise the dances were just fine – at least as long as my partner has a sense of dancing in time to the music, I can do something. Not everyone was capable of this – even very late into the evening when most people had left. Being a stranger to the scene with a distinct style and some unique moves, I must have come across as being a bit flashy – at least based upon some reactions. This is nothing to make a big deal about considering I did not notice an abundance of performer/teacher types – I learned later that the best follower I had there had been dancing for less than 2 years. Also I had about 4-6 refusals for dance (I have no idea if they saw me dancing) also including one or two cases of choosy-partner syndrome.